Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present –day levels, just 20 more years of emissions would give a 25% probability that warming exceeds 2oC. Even with zero emissions after 2030. Every year of delayed action increase the chances of exceeding 2oC warming.

Recent global temperatures demonstrate human-based warming: Over the past 25 years temperatures have increased at a rate of 0.190C per decade, in every good agreement with predictions based on greenhouse gas increases. Even over the past ten years, despite a decrease in solar forcing, the trend continues to be one of warming. Natural, short- term fluctuations are occurring as usual but there have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend.

Acceleration of melting of ice-sheets, glaciers and ice-caps: A wide array of satellite and ice measurements now demonstrate beyond doubt that both the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate. Melting of glaciers and ice-caps in other parts of the world has also accelerated since 1990.

Rapid Arctic sea-ice decline: Summer-time melting of Arctic sea-ice has accelerated far beyond the expectations of climate models. This area of sea-ice melt during 2007-2009 was about 40% greater than the average prediction from IPCC AR4 climate models.

Current sea-level rise underestimates: Satellites show great global average sea-level rise (3.4 mm/yr over the past 15 years) to be 80% above past IPCC predictions. This acceleration in sea-level rise is consistent with a doubling in contribution from melting of glaciers, ice caps and the Greenland and West-Antarctic ice-sheets.

Sea-level prediction revised: By 2100, global sea-level is likely to rise at least twice as much as projected by Working Group 1 of the IPCC AR4, for unmitigated emissions it may well exceed 1 meter. The upper limit has been estimated as – 2 meters sea-level rise by 2100. Sea-level will continue to rise for centuries after global temperature have been stabilized and several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries.

Delay in action risks irreversible damage: Several vulnerable elements in the climate system (e.g. continental ice-sheets. Amazon rainforest, West African monsoon and others) could be pushed towards abrupt or irreversible change if warming continues in a business-as-usual way throughout this century. The risk of transgressing critical thresholds (“tipping points”) increase strongly with ongoing climate change. Thus waiting for higher levels of scientific certainty could mean that some tipping points will be crossed before they are recognized.

The turning point must come soon: If global warming is to be limited to a maximum of 2oC above pre-industrial values, global emissions need to peak between 2015 and 2020 and then decline rapidly. To stabilize climate, a decarbonized global society – with near-zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases – need to be reached well within this century. More specifically, the average annual per-capita emissions will have to shrink to well under 1 metric ton CO2 by 2050. This is 80-90% below the per-capita emissions in developed nations in 2000.

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Opinion(s):

Anonymous
said...

Is this the same Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, who became famous for concocting a “hockey stick” graph that depicted a sudden rise in the Earth’s temperature that was later revealed to have been falsified? Yup, thanks for posting real trustworthy articles.

Anon 9.05. So because the politicians want to use global warming to tax the First World that means it doesn't exist? That's just not logical. That's like saying, there is no waste because the town council wants to tax me for waste removal. Huh?

Since when do you have to check with your political alliances to make up your mind whether something is a threat to your existence, or not?

Your hero Al Gore, unlke FishEagle, doesn't even believe his own predictions. Why else would he have bought a $4 million apartment in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, in the same year that he predicted a 20 ft rise in sea levels?

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The hockey stick was proven to be bogus and all that gave it weight was the scientists that hang together like a bunch of bananas. It is bogus because it copletes fails to address issues like the little ice age etc.

http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

"In the Sargasso Sea (an area popularly known as the `Bermuda Triangle'), radiocarbon dating of marine organisms in sea bed sediments by L. Keigwin [12] demonstrates that sea surface temperatures were around 2°F cooler than today around 400 years ago (the Little Ice Age), and around 2°F warmer than today 1,000 years ago (the Medieval Warm Period). In addition, the data also demonstrates that the period before 500 BC (the so-called Holocene Climatic Optimum) saw temperatures up to 4°F warmer - and without any greenhouse gas component to cause it."

..........

Fact is that we are polluting the planet. Another fact is that it has very little to do with carbon dioxide. All this does is to draw attention away from the real issues.

Greed caused the elites to think that they can create a worldwide taxation system. Now their dreams are falling like a card house and the world isn't paying attention to the very real threat of pollution. (not carbon dioxide)

@FisheagleAs you can see the temperature measurements weren't taken from the air, but from the sea, so your argument is nullified.A4

@ FE, you desperately need to read this if you want to be intellectually honest with yourself. a debate between authorities from both sides of the global waring debate: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/debate_at_last.pdf

@ A4. My argument has not been nulified. It still explains why the earth's surface temperature records have fluctuated during the past few years, even dropping slightly, while the increasing heat due to CO2 emissions has being absorbed by the oceans.

A great site that explains all the myths about climate change, including the notion that the hockey stick graph has been debunked, can be found at the New Scientist's site:

Love the reference to the "peer reviewed scientific studies" especially now that it has become clear that these so called peers are as tight as a group of bananas, having left scientific objectivity behind.

Read the following very carefully because it is very, very basic....

The official source which supposedly ends all discussion of the subject is the IPCC. They claim that the global temperature has increased by 0.6°C over the past century due to humans putting carbon dioxide into the air. But only 0.2°C was directly due to the CO2, while the other 0.4°C was due to increased water vapor resulting from the first 0.2°C caused by the CO2.

So here's an explanation of this subject showing what a fraud it is. The amount of water vapor in the air varies from 0 to 3% depending upon humidity. An average cannot be measured, so a good guess is used, and the usual claim is that the average is about 1.2%. Since carbon dioxide is highly uniform, its average is easily measured at 385 ppm (parts per million). Dividing the 1.2% for water vapor by the 385 ppm for CO2 indicates that there is 31 times as much water vapor in the air as CO2.

Another important fact is that water vapor will absorb three times as much radiation as CO2. This statement is based on bandwidth of absorption. It means that the number of frequencies of radiation absorbed is three times as great for water vapor. This is determined by graphing the absorption. The absorption peaks are three times as wide for water vapor as for CO2.

Therefore, one should multiply the 31 times the 3 and get about 100 times as much of a greenhouse gas for water vapor as for CO2. Climatologists and the IPCC admit that water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2.

So the promoters of the global warming hype (including the IPCC) decided to attribute most of the global warming to a secondary effect by water vapor. They have a bad habit of starting at the end point by picking convenient numbers and then rationalizing them. When there is no significant accountability, as in this case, the rationalizations get so absurd or nonexistent as to be blatant fraud.

If a 0.2°C increase in temperature due to CO2 increase can cause an increase in water vapor to cause an increase in temperature of three times that amount, then the same should occur everywhere. Temperatures increase about 20°C between night and day. Temperatures increase 20-30°C between the tropics and temperate zones. When does it cause three times that much increase due to water vapor? Heat will cause water to vaporize within a few minutes or not at all.

The argument for this absurdity is that the secondary increase in temperature is a one time thing. There are several frauds in such a claim. Nature cannot distinguish secondary effects from primary effects. A temperature increase is always nothing other than a temperature increase. This means the 0.4°C supposedly caused by water vapor must also be increased by a factor of three due to its secondary effects. The result would be thermal runaway.

One of the arguments is that the average water vapor is stable and unchanging, unlike the effects of CO2. That claim is absurd, because most of the water vapor is put into the air by oceans, and they vary immensely on a long term basis, as demonstrated by El Ninos and El Ninas in the Pacific Ocean. The Gulf Stream in the Atlantic also varies a lot. Oceans control the climate; and if they are not changing the temperature through water vapor, then humans are not changing it through carbon dioxide.

Anon 2.35. You seem to know a lot about the scientific objectivity of the reference I provided. Maybe you'd like to fill us all in about how the scientists left their objectivity behind.

"The level of water vapour in the atmosphere is determined mainly by temperature, and any excess is rapidly lost. The level of CO2 is determined by the balance between sources and sinks, and it would take hundreds of years for it to return to pre-industrials levels even if all emissions ceased tomorrow. Put another way, there is no limit to how much rain can fall, but there is a limit to how much extra CO2 the oceans and other sinks can soak up." This explanation is found at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11652-climate-myths-co2-isnt-the-most-important-greenhouse-gas.html

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.

Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? (Continuum, £16.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £14.99 plus £1.25 p & p.

They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.